Psychopathology

1/27/2025

The still-face experiment

• Infant communication

• Babies feed off other’s responses to them

• When the mother stopped responding to the baby’s expressions, she reacted with negative emotions

• Relational-cultural theory: connection and disconnection

Protective presence

• Ideally, we have someone in our lives to protect us

  • Mom who tells you to put a coat on, etc

• Many abnormal behaviors are caused by stress

Psychopathology

• Psychopathology: the study of abnormal psychology

• Study of people who suffer mental, emotional, and often physical pain

• Sometimes the experiences of people with psychopathology are unusual

• Sometimes the experiences of people with psychopathology are familiar to us, but more extreme

• Ways abnormality has been defined:

  • Intuitive sense of abnormality

  • Symptoms of mental illness

  • Cultural norms

  • 4 Ds

    • Deviance

    • Disfunction

    • Distress

    • Dangerousness

  • Subjective judgements

• Emergence of modern perspectives

  • Modern Biological Perspectives

  • The Psychoanalytic Perspective

  • The Roots of Behaviorism

  • The Cognitive Revolution

• Modern mental health care

  • Deinstitutionalization

  • Managed care

  • Professions within abnormal psychology

Integrationist approach to understanding mental health (biopsychosocial approach)

• Biological factors

• Social factors

• Psychological factors

1/39/2024

Theory and treatment of abnormality

• Theory: the set of ideas that provides that framework fro gathering and interpreting information about the phenomenon

• Therapy: a treatment based in theory that addresses the factors the theory says causes the phenomenon

Biopsychosocial approach

• Sociocultural approach: views disorders as the result of environmental and cultural norms

• Biological approach: views disorders as the result of abnormal genes or neurobiological dysfunction

• Psychological approach: iews disorders as the result of thinking processes, personality styles, and conditioning

Interactions between genes and environment

• Genetic factors can influence the kinds of environments we choose, which then reinforce our genetically influenced personalities and interests

• The environment may act as a catalyst for genetic tendency

• Epigenetics indicate that environmental conditions can affect the expression of genes

Therapies

• Antipsychotic drugs

• Antidepressand drugs

• Lithium

• Antianziety drugs

• ECT: used for treating severe mood disorders

• Repretitive magnetic stimulation (rTMS): repeated high intensity magnetic pulses

• Deep brain stimulation

• Psychosurgery: rarely used, only for treatment resistant disorders

Approaches

• Behavioral (B.F. skinner)

  • There is a consequence for every action

• Cognitive (CBT): how your thoughts impact your behavior

  • A=acting event

  • B=belief system

  • C=consequence

  • D=dispute

• Psychodynamic

  • Looking at how past consequences have impacted one’s present behavior

  • Freud

  • Ego defense mechanisms; Tries to keep anxiety down via repression.

    • baby talk is a form of regression — you can say mean or risky things thinking that nobody will hurt the baby

      • not usually conscious

• Humanistic

  • Person-centered therapy

  • Genuineness

  • Unconditional positive regard

• Family systems

  • The family is your client

  • Based on general systems theory

• Third wave approaches

  • Dialectal behavior therapy (DBT) from CBT/added pieces

Cultural issues

• Focus on individual vs cultures that focus on the group or collective community

  • One’s identity not seen as separate from the community which they belong too

• Many therapies value the expression of emotions/disclosure of personal personal concerns

  • Not valued in all cultures

• Taking the initiative in communication vs clash with deference to people whom they consider authority

2/10/2025

Diagnostic criteria for anxiety

• Fears are completely unrealistic

• Fears are excessive

• Persist long after the threat has passed

• Leads to impairment

2/19/2025

Depression

• Anhedonia: losing enjoyment for things you used to love

• Changes in appetite

• Psychomotor retardation

  • Psychomotor agitation

Major Depression disorder

• Can be single episode or recurrent

• Rule out normal and exprecter depressive response to grief vs complex grief

• Must experience depressed mood and markedly dimished interest or pleasure in most activities

• Can also have

  • Insomnia or hypersomnia

  • Psychomotor retardation/agitation

  • Feelings of worthlessness

  • Fatigue

  • Diminished ability to concentrate

  • Recurrent thoughts of death

• Episode can’t be attributable to a substance or other medical condition

• Cant be better explained by another disorder

Persistent depressive disorder

• Depressed mood for most of the day for 2 years

  • For children/adolescents, 1 year

• Needs to have 2 or more

  • Poor appetite

  • hopelessness

  • fatigue

Seasonal affective disorder

• History of at least 2 years of major depressive disorder

• Depressed when daylight hours are short, recover when daylight hours are long

• Some have forms of mania in the summer

Peripartum onset

• MDD episode during pregnancy

• 50$ of postpartum MD episodes begin prior to delivery

• 30% of women have postpartum blues 3 weeks after delivery

Suicide

• Suicide cluster: two or more suicides or attempted suicides nonrandomly bunched together in high school or in response to a suicide of a celebrity

• Suicide contagion: modeling the behavior of the friend or admired celebrity who committed suicide

• Suicide runs in families

• hopelessness and impulsivity are personality factors in suicide

Bipolar disorder

• Manic depression

• Genetic

• Mania is the opposite of mania

2/26/2025

Jennings, H. (2023). Nolen-Hoeksema’s Abnormal psychology (9th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Oltmanns, T.F. & Martin, M.T., (2019). Case studies in abnormal psychology

(11th ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.